Friday, January 18, 2013

You would think the Grand Old Party would have been snapped into sanity and propelled on to a changed path if for no other reason than simple self-preservation by its repeat loss in November to nemesis Barack Obama.

You would have thought that the GOP would have been forced to grasp the real math, and the true map, and understand, finally, painfully that voters rejected their ideas, plans and standard-bearers as extreme, narrow-minded, archaic, tone-deaf and increasingly irrelevant.

You'd have thought that. And you'd have been as wrong as they are proving themselves to be.

GOP politicking since the election, and particularly after the shootings of first-graders and school staffers in Newtown, CN is proving that party leaders, talk show propagandists and many, if not most of its elected officials, have neither brains nor hearts nor common-sense, survival instincts.

Since Newtown, the GOP and its machinery have been out there whipping up firearm-owner fears by calling Pres. Obama a gun-confiscating, Constitution-trampling tyrant and even King - - real fighting words to replace Kenyan, socialist, communist, Muslim - - for signing Presidential orders on administrative matters related to firearms, law enforcement, gun safety and science that are completely within his executive purview as the elected Chief Executive - - just as past Presidents of both parties had done routinely on a multiplicity of issues.

The GOP and its publicists are playing a dangerous, reactive and incendiary game frightening anti-Obama voters and gun-owners by throwing out calls for secession, nullification, rebellion.

Do they want Civil War, The Sequel?

Anger, demagoguery and intentional Knownothingism can't possibly be the agenda of a modern, national political party - - an organization and legacy that has devolved from the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower to the party of Ryan and Bachmann, Limbaugh and Priebus, Gohmert and Rove.

The two most recent Presidential elections should have made clear to the GOP - - and polling further backs it up - - that extremism in the pursuit of partisan power in the Year 2013 is just that: Extremism.

Counterfeit. Unworthy of the country. Toxic.

Rejected.

The GOP may hang on to legislative districts cherry-picked and preserved for ephemeral advantage through gerrymandering, but escalating, irreversible demographic changes and grassroots revulsion at contemporary Republican tactics - - from carrying the NRA's post-massacres' water to organized, perilous obstruction of climate change science to withholding timely aid to Northeast storm suffers to promoting "self-deportation" of immigrants to undermining women's reproductive rights and equal pay to threatening defaults and economic ruination over Congressional spending already out the door - - are speeding the GOP's self-destruction.

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What water, wetland protection is all about

"A little fill here and there may seem to be nothing to become excited about. But one fill, though comparatively inconsequential, may lead to another, and another, and before long a great body may be eaten away until it may no longer exist. Our navigable waters are a precious natural heritage, once gone, they disappear forever," wrote the Wisconsin Supreme Court in its 1960 opinion resolving Hixon v. PSC and buttressing The Public Trust Doctrine, Article IX of the Wisconsin State Constitution.

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James Rowen's Bio

James Rowen, a writer and consultant, has worked for newspapers, and as the senior Mayoral staffer, in Madison and Milwaukee, WI. This blog began on 2/2/ 2007. Posts run also at various news sites, including The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's "Purple Wisconsin."